Ethical Considerations for Developing Repository Warning Messages to the Future - 16152

One topic being addressed internationally through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Nuclear Energy Agency initiative on the Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory is the nature of messages to be sent into the distant future, and the means whereby to send them. The U.S. Department of Energy Carlsbad Field Office is the owner of a mined geologic repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. By regulation, this office must implement, prior to the repository being closed, 'passive institutional controls' that last as long as practicable. In the case of this specific repository, all the waste is government generated (defense programs) hence all funding is public money. As such, the preliminary vision for this message conveyance is a somewhat elaborate system that includes records rooms, monoliths, and inscriptions in seven different languages. As the time for repository closure approaches, this aspect of the repository investment will incur a considerable portion of the closure funds appropriated by the U.S. Congress. An ethical question that arises concerns the effects of the public investment to be made on the generations paying for it, and the risk-avoidance benefit to be expected for the generations going into the far future. This is an especially pressing question where taxpayer (public) money is involved, although it does not make sense to waste money collected from any source. This paper explores the ethical dimensions of creating a substantial and sophisticated system of warnings that communicates into the future and concludes that the repository warning system needs to be practicable from a technical point of view, reasonable from an investment point of view, and ethical from an inter-generational equity point of view. (authors)